Realisation of Ipad sketch in ink and pastel, on balcony in shade, listening to Spotify classical guitar daily mix.
Tag Archives: fantasy
Dr Sketchys: Steampunk III
She harvested moonlight broken by droplets scattered by flying fish, and the phosphorescence left in their wake.
He scooped up after-images of butterflies in sunlight, the glisten of dew on beetles’ carapaces, the warning shock of wasps’ weeds.
From this they wove a cloth so fine that a bale of the stuff could fit in a razor shell.
They pitched their iridescent tent at twilight, at the surf’s edge, between silence and laughter.
Credits
Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, The Victoria, Birmingham. 24th September 2016
The Sea Hunter – Kitten von Mew
The Land Gatherer – Richard von Mew
The difficulty of crossing a field
Ambrose Bierce’s admirably concise narrative tells of a man, Williamson, rising to walk to the distant pasture to speak on a particular matter with Andrew, his brother, the overseer, there supervising a dozen slaves; crossing a close-cropped field, level and without any means of concealment, and disappearing such that no person hears of or sees him again, so that he is declared dead and his estate is distributed according to the law. The sole testimony is from a neighbour, Wren, who saw both Williamson’s presence and then, immediately after, his absence but who was distracted at the moment of disappearance. The woman, Williamson’s wife, black servant Sam and boy, Wren’s son, who were each greatly disturbed by the actual event, were deemed incompetent. What had become of Mr Williamson? Bierce states clearly, it was not the business of this narrative to answer that question. The central event itself is not examined and the reader is left to fill in the details.
I came to this story though David Lang’s opera of the same name, a chance finding on Spotify. Listening to this several times without any idea of its cast or staging nor the story or setting, the sense came to me of the neuroticism of oppression: that the act of oppression was driving the white folks mad and that myth and superstition were interwoven with horror and despair.
Mac Wellman’s libretto expands the original story to some 18 pages, seeing the events from the perspectives of the different actors,yet without resolving Bierce’s central question.
At the heart of the piece is the tightly self-constrained testimony of Andrew, the overseer, explaining his principles of managing slaves and maintaining self respect, which collapses into anger and rhythmic evocative nonsense: “His name was Clock, of the tribe of Clock. But I fear his true mode of locomotion, like that of Prince Zandor, was more humble, the singleton crutch, or cane, of the tribe of Crutch, or Cane”. Andrew clarifies that seemingly random shouted words were the attributes, or names, of the slaves working in that distant field: Round, Square, Juniper, Crabgrass, Candlestick, Limbo, Clock, Bumblebee, Jackass, Crawdad, Nuisance, Puissance, Doorbell, Virginia Creeper. The slaves are the chorus and Virginia Creeper their caller. The overseer’s words become but an echo of the chorus’ ritual chanting: they are building a nation, seeking an erasure of John C. Calhoun (who promulgated that slavery was more than a “necessary evil” but was a social good) and invoking Prince Zandor, the one-legged red-coated predatory demon from their ancestral mythology.
Dr Sketchy’s Birmingham: warm up
I had found a seat out of the way and fairly close to the small stage in the upper room above the pub. People were coming in, finding chairs and getting out pads and pencils. I started to draw straightaway in my smallest sketchbook, rough fast images to loosen up my hand and brain.
With reference to the legend on the sketch, it wasn’t the semi nakedness that threw me, it was the horse’s head (when I drew the next sketch, it was hidden from my view – I think he is still holding it but it’s obscured by the head of the lady in front of me). Such is my ignorance of contemporary culture, I did not at this point know the significance of the white horse, nor of owls or logs or layers of plastic.
Four hours of drawing were opened, compered and closed by jazz and blues singer Liberty Pink. My first drawings, while she sang and then posed for 15 minutes, were done blocking in colour in conte crayon and drawing into this with brush pen. I feel these did her looks and movement little justice. I think the very last sketch of the afternoon, drawn in pen and water as she sung her closing blues tribute to coffee, captured her style and demeanour better.
The next post involves the horses head.
Beethoven Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor II: Arietta
I drew this one evening using the music to drive the strokes of charcoal. I wet it and scraped back to the white highlights with a fragment of lava. While cropping the photo, I noticed the invert function that reversed black and white. The original is below.
Last week, I watched a stunning performance of the ballet “Bye” danced by Sylvie Guillem, set to this piece and choreographed by Mats Ek.
However, the image I have drawn owes more to a set of line drawings by the late painter Barbara Tate and to archival photographs of 1940s Soho. In her early 20s, Tate found employment as a maid, keeping house for a prolific and dramatic sex worker.
The garden beneath the bones
This large picture began as a layer of chalk pastel using a remembered images of a fallen tree as a source. I disintegrated that with charcoal, oil pastel and water. The skeletal remains of a long extinct mythical creature were overlaid in acrylic. And then I developed this further on the iPad as a steampunk cityscape, creating “The Ribs“.
Still, the real picture remained. I experimented with printing from paper covered with coloured oil pastel and overlaid with white acrylic, placed face down on my picture, and with heat applied. Initial tests suggested the acrylic would melt and carry the oil pastel onto the picture. It failed. The acrylic did not adhere and instead, the paint for the ribs was lifted off.
The next experiment was more successful. I took scraps of various papers, layered in oil pastel my desired colours and, on top, white oil pastel. Again, I used heat to print these onto my picture, creating the effect seen above. I worked into these with more layers of printing and then brought out contrasting tones with ink painted onto the resisting surface. I had to repaint the bones.
All in all, satisfying textures and strengths of colour on a dark background. There may be more to do on this.
Wyrm
Chalk pastel and ink highlights …
over a ground of sun-dried blots in paynes grey and sepia ink.
Gorilla art
I wanted to design a picture for my daughter’s sixth birthday showing her reading, leaning back against the warm body of a large animal: a dragon? a bear?
The last few days her favourite book turns out to be Anthony Browne’s Gorilla. A little girl wants a gorilla for her birthday but is disappointed when she gets just a toy. Then the magic happens … of course.
So she likes gorillas. I finally got round to drawing this in the early hours of the morning. Thanks to all the photographers whose pictures were accessible via google images – I didn’t have access to a high altitude tropical forest to work from life.
Experimental drawing: shards
The chosen reference for our experimental drawing workshops is the work of Anselm Kiefer.
His work is carried out on a large scale, constructed thickly with paint, clay, ash, straw, metal, glass and the written word. The images constitute a dialogue, perhaps more an argument with recent history, art and culture.
Responding to his art challenged me. Paint combines with solid materials stuck to the surface. Is this collage or mosaic or painting or a display of found objects? Are the components iconic or, like individual pigment granules, devoid of individual symbolism? Other than scale, what distinguishes this art from a child’s picture of glued autumn leaves?
In my first layer, I blocked in a silhouette of my home town in acrylic rose and phthalo green.
Weeks then elapsed. I returned with toolbox, a hammer, glue, white porcelain plates, bark, feathers from a predated corpse and tarmac gathered from a surface disrupted by a root.
I suspended the shards and granules in a sea of glue and swept into shapes using a plastic blade. In my mind, there was a direct link back to this earlier work in charcoal (https://kestrelart.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/swarm/).
Two more weeks have passed since. Paint and glue has dried. This week, I spent some time drinking coffee, just looking and thinking. Then I tried to recreate and expand the obscured cityscape, painting into and over this surface. I will post that next layer sometime soon.
I have only seen Anselm Kiefer’s paintings as photographs. I cannot find an example displayed in the UK although the Tate and the National Gallery of Scotland seem to have archived a number of pieces. I did not know of him earlier in the year when work was exhibited at the White Cube. My knowledge of him to date is largely gleaned from the internet, including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_Kiefer
Fine artist Chris Wood comments below and introduced me to the work of Julian Schnabel. I post the link here so anyone else interested in this theme can follow it. http://www.julianschnabel.com/category/paintings/plate-paintings
Experimental landscapes III: between breakfast and homework
Bridging the gap between breakfast and homework this morning, we folded a piece of purple typing paper to create a book with panels as numbered pages.
Unfolded, we took turns drawing a continuous line across the panels aiming to create double pages in the book from the discontinuous panels. We began with a dinosaur theme but the middle pages got hijacked by a fairytale castle and somehow the last ones became cityscapes. We wanted to colour it quickly and the paper would not take paint, so we used thick chalk pastels, too big for the job. No finesse here.
I refolded it, sewed the spine and cut the pages . Here is the sequence of pages, with pretentious words added.
This quick game was based on the method suggested by Greg Poole and described in the last post.
kestrelart 